Tableau Server on Linux Help

Upgrade Tableau Server

Version: 2019.2

To upgrade Tableau Server you install the new version while your existing version is running, then run an upgrade script to switch over to the new version. This reduces the amount of downtime for users because the server continues to run while you install the new version. You only stop the server to run the upgrade script.

Important: Upgrading Tableau Server on Linux from version 10.5.x (10.5.0 or later) requires special steps that are documented separately. For instructions for how to upgrade from 10.5.x, see Upgrade Tableau Server on Linux from 10.5.

General notes about upgrading:

All upgrades:

Backup—Create a backup. You are responsible for creating a backup of your existing Tableau Server data before upgrading. We strongly recommend creating a backup before upgrading as this provides you with an up-to-date version of your data you can use if you need to go back to your earlier version of Tableau Server. For more information on properly preparing for an upgrade, see Prepare for the Upgrade.

Licenses—

Trial product keys—You cannot directly upgrade a server that is running a trial product key from one major version to another (for example, from version 10.5.x to version 2018.x). To upgrade from one major version to another with a trial product key, install the new version of Tableau Server on a separate machine, activate a trial key there, and restore a backup from your existing version. For more information, see Confirm licensing requirements.

Expired maintenance—You cannot upgrade a server with a product key whose maintenance has expired or expires on a date earlier than the release date of the version you are upgrading to. If you attempt to upgrade a server in this state, your server will be unlicensed and the upgrade may fail. If your maintenance has expired or is too old, refresh your product key before you run the upgrade script to upgrade to your new version. If refreshing the key does not update maintenance to a valid date, check in the Tableau Customer Portal for a Tableau Server key with current maintenance. For details on refreshing the product key, see Refresh Maintenance Date for the Product Key.

Install while running—When you upgrade Tableau Server, you install the new version before uninstalling the old version. The upgrade process will leave the old version in place. You can uninstall the old version after the upgrade is complete to free up disk space, though this is not required.

Upgrade script—To complete the upgrade and switch to the new version, after installing the new version on all nodes in your cluster, run the upgrade script upgrade-tsm on the initial node. The script is installed in the \scripts.<version_code>directory. Run the script from the new version you just installed.

Multi-node upgrades:

Node installation—Run the installer on all nodes in a cluster.

The steps below describe the general process for an upgrade of Tableau Server on Linux. Upgrades from beta versions of Tableau Server on Linux are not supported. If you are a Tableau Server on Windows user and want to switch to Tableau Server on Linux, see Migrate Tableau Server from Windows to Linux.

As a best practice you should always make a full backup before upgrading any version of Tableau Server. Save this backup file to a location that is not part of your server installation. Creating and saving a backup preserves your pre-upgrade data and configuration and gives you a rollback option in the event of issues during the upgrade. For more information, see Back up Tableau Server data.

When upgrading Tableau Server on Linux, you do not need to uninstall the previous version. After upgrading you can uninstall the package for the previous version if you choose to do so. One reason to do this is to free up disk space used by the older version. To understand the difference between removing and uninstalling Tableau Server on Linux, see Uninstall Tableau Server.

Upgrading Tableau Server requires a stop and start the server as part of the upgrade process. During this stop/restart Tableau Server is unavailable.

Upgrading will also apply any pending changes. If you have pending changes you do not want applied, you can discard those changes using the tsm pending-changes discard command. To see what changes might be pending, use the tsm pending-changes list command.

Upgrading Tableau Server on Linux

Follow these steps on each node in your cluster to upgrade Tableau Server.

On each node in your cluster:

Copy the new Tableau Server .rpm or .deb package to a location accessible from the computer you are upgrading.

If you are upgrading a distributed deployment of Tableau Server, then copy the .rpm or .deb package to each node in the cluster or to a location accessible from each node.

Log on as a user with sudo access to the computer you are upgrading.

Navigate to the directory where you copied the .rpm or .debTableau Server package.

Use the package manager to install the Tableau Server package.

On RHEL-like distributions, including CentOS, you have the option to install Tableau to a non-default location. If you choose to do so, you need to

Default location—To install to the default location (/opt/tableau/tableau_server), run the following commands:

sudo yum update

sudo yum install tableau-server-<version>.x86_64.rpm

Non-default location—To install to a non-default location, you must use rpm -i. You will also need to install all dependent packages. See the note below.

Run the following command:

sudo rpm -i --prefix /preferred/install/path tableau-server.rpm

Note: When you use yum to install Tableau Server, all dependent packages are automatically downloaded and installed. This is the preferred method for installing Tableau. If you want to install to a non-default location, or your organization does not allow you to use yum and you must install using rpm -i, you must also install all dependent packages separately. For information about installing dependent packages, see Installing Tableau Server on an Air-Gapped Computer Running Linux.

where <version_code> is the long form of new version you are upgrading to, for example scripts.20183.18.1128.2033, and <system_admin> is a user with administrative permissions on the computer where the initial node is installed. You will be prompted for the password for the administrative user.

The -u option was added as of 2018.1. For more information, see Updated upgrade-tsm script. To see all the options available for the upgrade-tsm script, use the -h option. For example:

upgrade-tsm -h

After the upgrade is completed, exit the terminal session on the initial node and log in again. This ensures that your session will be using the updated TSM version.

Start Tableau Server:

tsm start

If you are planning to enable Tableau Prep Conductor on your Tableau Server, you can do so once you have upgraded Tableau Server to version 2019.1 or later. Tableau Prep Conductor allows you to publish, run, and schedule flows on your Tableau Server and is available for Tableau Server 2019.1 and later. For more information, see the following topics: